Making these is one of my earliest memories of paper construction from my childhood. I love the way they make such ‘fluffy’ trees.

Not much needed in the way of expensive materials are needed for this paper craft for children! We subscribe to a newspaper and use it to light our fire, line the bottom of the chicken coop and under mulch on the garden, but we still have plenty left for a forest of newspaper trees. Oh yes, we read some of it too!

So this one ticks lots of paper crafts for children boxes, it is easy, fun, uses recyclable materials, and is nice and speedy! You also have the option of making a mess with it like we have with this one, or keeping tidy and clean by leaving the paints in the cupboard like we did with our first paper tree forest. The instructions to make the trees are available on the Paper Tree Tutorial, and as usual there is a free PDF you can download and print out.

When we made this tree we used a few painting techniques to decorate it. We splattered the leaves of the tree with green paint. Flicking the paint onto the newspaper using an old toothbrush – the splattering technique shows up much better on our 3D lizards though.

The trunk is a cardboard roll from lunch paper. It is painted with little spirals and lines to replicate bark. This way of creating a bark image also works with pencils and it works best when done a little roughly too – so it suits impatient crafters like me just perfectly!

The flowers on the base were number one daughters idea. I was just going to do little yellow dots when she said I had to put little white dots around them to make daisies. Hmmm, wish I had not done quite so many little yellow dots!! But it did not take long and she was right, they do look just like daisies – so a tip from the youngest in the family on how to create lots of cute flowers.